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pants2yesterday at 9:36 PM8 repliesview on HN

LinkedIn offers no way for $company to disavow users who claim to work for $company - they will appear on the official company page as long as it's in their profile.

We've had fake recruiters that claim to work for us running basically the same scam. These are great fake profiles: LinkedIn Premium, tons of relevant posts, etc... but they don't work for us, and we get angry messages from people saying our recruiter tried to scam them. No, they're not our recruiter despite showing up on our company page on LinkedIn. No number of reports could get them taken down.

I finally got it solved by buying drinks for a buddy of mine that works for LinkedIn, but not all startups have that connection!


Replies

tweetle_beetleyesterday at 9:49 PM

LinkedIn didn't even disavow people pretending to work for LinkedIn until someone had too much fun with it - https://chrisduffycomedy.com/blog/2016/11/2/6-months-as-the-...

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sensanatyyesterday at 9:57 PM

My last 2 companies, LinkedIn asked me to add an email address associated with the said company and actually confirm via said email in order to add them to my profile. So, if I worked for FooCompany, I had to have a @FooCompany.com email which is setup by someone at the company itself. Does this not cover what you're talking about?

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ChrisMarshallNYtoday at 12:48 AM

> LinkedIn offers no way for $company to disavow users who claim to work for $company - they will appear on the official company page as long as it's in their profile.

I remember getting an office manager, working from Dubai (I think), for my one-person, basically nonexistent company, working from my living room, in New York.

She may still be there. I never bother checking into LI, except making an occasional post, every few months.

cbm-vic-20today at 12:50 AM

I was looking for people who I had worked with at a company that was acquired 15 years ago, and some random person claims to be the CEO of that company.

prawntoday at 2:38 AM

How does that not become a legal issue?

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underliptonyesterday at 10:30 PM

>I finally got it solved by buying drinks for a buddy of mine that works for LinkedIn

I'd like people to understand that this is a form of corruption. We've normalized many like it. LI knows that the only way to force them to fix the issue is to go through a drawn-out legal process, save a spate of bad press (RIP 60 Minutes), so of course they won't.

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throwaway7783yesterday at 11:13 PM

LinkedIn doesn't have any redressal mechanisms for anything. Someone I knew went through a lot of abuse by a LI user and kept making new accounts to harass. LinkedIn's response - "We did not find anything that violates our ToC". No wonder it has become a cesspool of spam, fraud and abusers.